The free software movement was born out of a response to a rising tide
of restrictions being placed on users via contracts and non-disclosure
agreements. The GNU General Public License (GPL) and other free
licenses provide legal mechanisms that help ensure that software can
carry to each user the freedom to run the software for any purpose and
to study, modify and share the source code.

Update: This story originally stated that Ututo was coming to an end. This was wrong. We misunderstood an announcement about a change of lead maintainers and thought that the project was shutting down. Ututo is still an actively maintained GNU/Linux distro.